The GNU tar command included with Linux distributions has integrated compression(.gz) .It can create a .tar archive and then compress it with gzip or bzip2 compression in a single command. The resulting file is a .tar.gz file or .tar.bz2 file. we will learn about how to create ,List and unzip Tar.gz file in Linux
How to create the tar.gz file
It uses the extra letter z to achieve it
tar -czvf directory.tar.gz <directory Name>
How to list tar.gz file
tar -ztvf <tar gz file>
How to compress using bzip2 compression
One more option for compression is available bzip2, it can be achieved using -j option
tar -cjvf directory.tar.bz2 <directory Name>
How to exclude some files
On some occasion you may wish to compress an entire directory, but not include certain files and directories. You can do so by appending an –exclude switch for each directory or file you want to exclude.
tar -czvf directory.tar.gz <directory Name> --exclude=*.txt
How to unzip Tar.gz file in Linux
tar -zxvf file.tar.gz
If it is required to extract few files only
tar -zxvf file.tar.gz file1 file2
If it is not possible to use the z option , we can use below option to compress the tar files also
tar compress directory command
tar -cvf - dir1 dir2 | compress > file.tar.Z
Uncompress will go like
uncompress -c file.tar.Z|tar -xvf -
tar gzip command
tar -cvf - file1 file2 | gzip > file.tar.gz
tar guzip command
gunzip -c file.tar.gz|tar -xvf -
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2